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Comment by senttoschool | Hacker News Reader

Everyone already knows that the more money California spends on homeless, the more of them will come to California.

It's a service. The state/city that provides the best service for homeless people - that's where I will try to go if I don't have a home.

Politicians don't seem to understand this. Or maybe they do, but they do the wrong thing in order to drum up politically correct votes.

Take San Francisco. It spends $400m on homeless each year. With $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in Idaho for every single one of them. Problem solved. Are you homeless? Make your way to San Francisco. The tax payers in the city will buy you a home in Idaho - no questions asked.

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> Martin cited a study from May 2018 by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which found 75 percent of the people on the street in Los Angeles County had a home in that same county before they lost it. It also showed that 65 percent of the unsheltered homeless had lived in that county for at least 20 years. Only 13 percent were from out of state.

Source: https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jun/28/dispelling-my...

Everyone knows, in the lyrics of Leonard Cohen -

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes Everybody knows

Those stats are outdated and generally somewhat dubious—what was the methodology here? Nonetheless, it is clear CA generates a lot of homeless. The linked study from 2018 claimed 52,765 homeless in LA county, while the count by the same group performed in 2022 tallied 69,144. Either there's a been a massive influx of people on the streets or their methodology is improving. Perhaps both. Pretty wild to think about.

Population keeps growing and prices keep going up. Native californians are being displaced onto the streets.

> With $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in Idaho for every single one of them. Problem solved.

The problem is that people become homeless due to a number of reasons that include addiction, mental illness, trauma, loss of work, etc. It’s not going to be solved by JUST providing them an apartment. At least not for everyone.

As someone who ended up homeless despite not fitting the typical profile - and has volunteered hundreds (possibly thousands) of hours in the space - you dramatically overstate the case for involuntary homelessness.

There couldn’t be a more significant difference between the homeless populations in places like SF and in other cities in the US with more sensible policies. There’s massively more people in California who are there because they’re voluntarily opting into a lifestyle where all of their capital expenditures are provided by taxpayers and they don’t have to do anything to maintain them other than to remain homeless. Many of these people may seem insane due to their drug use but their mental issues are a result, not a cause; they’re still rational actors responding to a perverse set of incentives.

Very frustrating to see the right blame the left for the homeless problem when the left are the only ones attempting to do anything about it.

Apparently if someone is hungry and you feed them, or if they are naked and you clothe then it's your own damn fault that people keep showing up.

More like...

- "when I was drug addicted you gave me cash"

- "when I was stealing to fund my addictions, you made shop lifting legal for stolen items amounting to $1000 or less"

- "when I was making violent threats, and assaulting members of the public you let me walk free"

- "when the police tried to intervene you said they were systematically racist against people of color and should be defunded"

- "when I had mental health issues, you closed down all the mental hospitals because you said they were oppressive institutions"

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

That's right. That's the hell hole San Francisco created. The city officials thought the tech tax money would never run out. Let's do extremely expensive feel-good, politically correct stuff to make people think we have a good heart.

What percentage is the budget do you imagine is being spent on homelessness?

> "when I had mental health issues, you closed down all the mental hospitals because you said they were oppressive institutions"

Wasn't that Reagan? Don't think that he was on the left.

There's plenty of stupidity to go around

The left's idea or "doing something about it" is making the problem worse not better. It would be better to do nothing than actively facilitate and incentivize homelessness and drug addiction with cash payments.

> The left's idea or "doing something about it" is making the problem worse not better. It would be better to do nothing than actively facilitate and incentivize homelessness and drug addiction with cash payments.

It at least keeps people alive. The problem is that the causes of homelessness are not addressed at all - there is nowhere near enough affordable housing stock.

> It at least keeps people alive.

It may well keep people alive - in a way, but it's no solution if it creates a mass of people who are destroying themselves and the city community.

It's still death - just in slow motion.

> The problem is that the causes of homelessness are not addressed at all - there is nowhere near enough affordable housing stock.

Yes, and that's not going to change, so alternative solutions are required.

> Yes, and that's not going to change, so alternative solutions are required.

And which ones, bar building housing, should that be?

Locking them up for the crime of not being able to afford a home (or being judged too unworthy of credit by three ultra-large black box corporations) is inhumane and costs the government way more than just giving them outright cash.

Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of favour - it's ripe for abuse.

And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts the problem elsewhere.

> Locking them up for the crime of not being able to afford a home

But we should lock them up for the crime of doing crime: dealing drugs, drunk and disorderly, assault, robbery, theft etc.

> and costs the government way more than just giving them outright cash.

The cut-price solution is clearly no solution at all.

> Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of favour - it's ripe for abuse.

These people meed help, and a drug-free environment is a place they can receive that help.

> And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts the problem elsewhere.

There are other places where some of these people (the ones without crippling mental health issues) stand a far better chance of building a stable life for themselves

Seriously mentally ill and addicted should be involuntarily committed. I know that's a big decision and will lead to abuse but the alternative of just having them roam the streets is worse. The "temporarily homeless" as I like to call them, those who want to be productive but have fallen on hard times, deserve access to affordable housing. The government can build huge amounts of tiny apartments to give these people, it worked in Chicago until they recently gave up and converted those units.

> It's still death - just in slow motion.

Also known as life.

Houston has gotten more people off the streets in the last decade than San Francisco or Los Angeles.

This ignores the fact that many of the homeless have other problems than just a lack of a roof over their heads. Drug addiction and untreated mental health issues are common (and overlap); domestic violence is another (related) cause for some of the homeless. Many of these issues don't go away by throwing houses at the problem.

Anyhow the main problem with the Idaho idea, beyond the politics/optics: what about getting the homeless into jobs? I don't think Idaho is overflowing with those, and I expect some of the homeless will be better off of employed.

Well...

The logical (and operative) end of this thought process is "make them miserable and they'll leave."

Some/many politicians do implement these kinds of policies, but you'll rarely hear the quite part out loud.

Nasty problems breed dishonesty. Humane homeless policies increases homelessness, and the visibility of homelessness... especially if homeless migration is prevalent.

The inhumane homelessness reduction policy is "abuse homeless people, then some will go away" No one wants to admit the other side of whatever coin they like. C'est la politique.

Does that free apartment in Idaho also come with food, drug treatment, social services, and at least the remote possibility of actually getting a job, all in Idaho?

Probably. You can even hire people to guard them, feed them, try to bring them back to society slowly.

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